[Music] [Shaun McCran] My name is Shaun McCran. You can see me on the slide. I lead product marketing in Europe for Adobe Commerce. I'm joined today by Emmylou Jordan, who's a senior manager for Global Business Insights and Data for Hanesbrands. This is predominantly Emmy talking. So I'm going to hand over to her quite quickly to talk about who Hanes Brands are, what they do, and how they run their business. [Emmylou Jordan] Yeah. Well, you guys can all call me Emmy because my friends call me Emmy. And I'm really, really glad to make so many friends today. Thank you for being here. I want to talk first about who Hanes Brands is. We're a large manufacturing company that's represented in multiple countries around the world with 10 over 10 iconic brands, some of which have been around for over 100 years. So we're a large company with a great heart and a lot of comfortability. Our consumers love us because we make it comfy for everybody and so that's really important to us and to our message and to our websites. We have about 48,000, employees worldwide. And so, as a large organization, we still try to make a personal touch at every single point for our consumers. - Yeah. - Great. Thank you very much.

We are telling a story today. That story is how I keep blocking the auto prompt. It's all about how Hanes have taken this journey, where they started off their storefront situation, how they're running a commerce business, how they selected Adobe as a strategic partner, move forward with that project, and then where they are now in terms of success and how that's progressed for them.

So that's a good story. That's what we're going to listen to. Emmy is going to bring that to life for us. And we're going to start off with some of those challenges. Where were they? Where did this story start from? Okay. So first thing, we'll look at what were some of the key issues Hanes Brands were facing in running a successful commerce storefront? So do you want to talk to us a little bit about that? I'd love to. So like many of us, we're dealing with performance issues, right? Retail websites, in particular, have historically lower bounce rates around the 20s and the 30s and we were following that trend. What was difficult for us is that because we were so non performant, we were up against much larger brands, specifically in the intimate space, and we weren't able to have the SEO foundation that we needed in order to meet the consumer where they were. And all of us, I bet today, have used Google. And so we wanted to make sure that our consumer could find us, get to know us with non-branded search terms so that we could compete. And a big part of that was becoming a highly performant site. So I would say that that was one of our major concerns, as well as lifting our consumer loyalty, we wanted to make sure that we were giving the best experience possible. And that's when we turned to Adobe. - Great. Thank you very much. - Yeah. So on the point of turning to Adobe, let's look at what Hanes brands have in terms of Adobe Experience Cloud. And this really plays into the story around why did you choose Adobe for the storefront experience from a commerce point of view. You can see we typically look at the experience cloud in these kind of nice blocks, but there's a significant existing relationship in place. So could you talk to that and see how that's evolved to give you the overall personalization story you have for us today? Sure, so we started our journey with Adobe through an implementation with RTCDP, which is the consumer data platform. For those of you that don't know, that is a place where we can create a holistic and unified consumer profile. That was really important to us. When we were implementing that, we also brought on Target, which is a personalization engine. We had Adobe Analytics, which is the Ferrari of analytics systems. We also wanted consumer journey analytics. So those were the things that we had already implemented. And we were loving it. And so what was natural, and the natural next step is to use Adobe Commerce better. And that was where we met Adobe Edge Delivery Services. So you can see here that we had that RTCDP because we knew that the consumer data was critical to our mission, we knew that we wanted Adobe Target for those personalized experiences, again, to meet the consumer where they were, we wanted customer journey analytics to really understand and visualize our consumer patterns, how those were changing, and how successful we were becoming, and then, of course, we met with Adobe Commerce, and that's where we fell in love with edge delivery services. Great. Thank you for that. So one of the key things I want to draw out there is that there's obviously a performance storefront story here, but there's also a personalization story. And what Emmy's just described is several of these other solutions come together to drive those personalization capabilities to make it that Emmy and her team can actually leverage solutions to drive her business goals. So not only are we talking speed, we're talking capability in terms of actually targeting things.

For me, the fascinating part of getting to know Emmy a bit more in this was that like any transformational journey, it's not just about the technology. In fact, the technology is often the thing that comes secondary to this.

I've always believed if you buy a Porsche and you drive it like a Fiesta, you'll still just have a Fiesta, right? You have to make the business process change around that. In this case, the other European guy laughing with me, that's a bad analogy in the UK. Here, it may not work. Sorry. In this case, there's an extremely important process that Emmy and her Hanes team use, which now I'm going to get you to talk through because this is key to how this works. Yeah. So this is our framework. And we like to look at the consumer journey in discrete steps. And even though these are discrete steps, they work on a macro and a micro level so that we're really being comprehensive as we approach our site and its functionality. So see, first, we have Find It. So Find It is, again, like I was mentioning earlier about that SEO issue we were seeing, the paid media and how much we were spending to get our ads in front of people, this was a big part of Find It, right? And optimizing that was a huge part of our journey. The second is around buy it. Buy it is the actual mechanism that the consumer is using to purchase our products. That can be anything from showing a matching set to the add to cart functionality. That's actually how the consumer is getting and purchasing the product on-site. The third is around get it. This is really important. It's about making sure that the consumer is pleased with the product that they've ordered, that they have received that product and relieved us of that liability of having that inventory. And then finally, we've got Know me. And Know Me is where my team comes in and really works the most. Know Me is a part of every single one of these. You've got find it, but how did that consumer find it? You've got buy it, but what functionality do they use in order to purchase it? What were those other products that they were really interested in that we can leverage in an activation or marketing way? We've got Get It, which is understanding the consumer's response to their product and their reviews of that product. And then every single one of those, every answer to the questions I just posed there, goes into creating the personalized white glove experience that we want to create on our websites. And we do that by using some pretty fabulous Adobe products.

I think the key thing as well that I find, and having been in the customer space myself historically, I look too young to be a customer as well as an Adobe person. I know it's difficult. But the one on the end, the know me part is really fundamental for this. And as a European, I recognize some of you in the room, I tend to troll them. You're quite a lot talking about concepts like show me you know me. If you can show a customer, you know them, you can build loyalty. Not only are you able to personalize, so what Emmy was talking about there, but you're able to build that loyalty by reinforcing with the customer that you hold data about them, and they trust you and you can use that data effectively. That's why recommendations and personalization really works in this case because you have that strength of relationship. Having data about someone is great. If you use it incorrectly, you break that trust. And it's a negative relationship. So the Know Me part here is really, really key.

So the four steps scenario you described there, I think, is extremely effective. And if you don't have that in place, I really don't see how any of this works. So that's amazing. There's a couple of key points we want to bring out across that in terms of key personalization principles or things you have in mind when your teams are executing that. So there's three here. Can you talk us through how those three works for you? Sure, let's start with the customer journey focus. So that is the steps that we just walked through, right? That's the Find It, Buy It, Get It, and Know Me. We are focusing on the customer at each of those separate points and trying to find those areas in which we can optimize their behavior, optimize our website in order to get the outcome that we desire. So... But ultimately, you're right. It's about knowing the consumer and knowing what they want and having that comprehensive profile via RTCDP that's really, really critical to understanding them and making sure that we're supporting their journey the best we can. The second one is around that representative personas. So, I actually have in the room today somebody from our consumer journey group who is an incredible force when it comes to the UI/UX experience and creating that customer journey. And personas are a huge part of that. If you're creating a journey without an individual in mind, you are missing steps, right? It's just like building a really solid use case as you're going into an implementation. The same can be said here. Building a very, very solid persona can actually help you with that consumer journey a lot better. Because now I understand everything about that consumer and I'm looking for those attributable profiles to that persona. And then I can look into my data and say, actually, what is happening in that journey? So personas are really important to us specifically in marketing but also in our creation of an ideal journey for each one. Do you want to name them, shame them? Do you want them to stand up? It's Shannon right here. - Wave your hand, Shannon. Yeah. - I know. - Is there Shannon in the front of me? - Yes. So there will be a call at the end if you want to talk to any of the teams. So it's good to know that Shannon is the persona person. Yes. Absolutely. I think that fits extremely well with the way Adobe approaches these things as well in the way that we're also persona driven. And it can be quite hard to really get inside the mindset of someone living that journey, because you can look in on the scenario and go, I think this is how it's going to work. Until you actually get inside the mind and live that experience yourself, which is difficult for commerce because we're all commerce people ourselves, we're all sat at home on your surface flicking around on a mobile or a tablet. But really understanding how you want that journey to look from a persona is a difficult process. But I think that's the way that actually leads to success rather than a technology journey. Well, and the data associated with that persona is really important. I am an analyst through and through. So my department, specifically, we work on everything from data layer development to tag management to data collection and then analysis. So analysis is really important to us. And when you have that persona, it makes it so much easier to be able to go into consumer journey analytics and say, hey, who am I looking for, and how can I find them? So it's really critical and goes back to that consumer journey group that we implemented at Hanes. Now the next is around that linking the journey to the business goals. So that's where we're saying, okay, now we've got this journey because we understand it from a data level, we've gone in and said, okay, what is our most traveled path? What is the persona that we want to hone in on? And then we have the desired outcome. So that desired outcome is where we are then going back to the journey and finding those little points of inflection that we can change within it to lead to the desired outcome. So that's the one that gives us the best success. That's the one that's the most fun to find. So, yeah. That's how I would say that those three really apply to our systems. Excellent. I think that leads nicely onto the point you just made there, which is all about an agility to test and learn.

So at kind of concept level, one of the other things that I tend to talk about is the ability to test and learn something quickly and easily. And don't be afraid to fail. Fail, but fail fast and learn from it. And often in a role within an organization, your name, your brand, your position in the company might be attached to that failure. So you don't want to fail big. But there shouldn't be as big a fear of failure as people have often because it stifles your ability to move forward. So again, in an agile methodology, the option to take a step forward, try it, you will learn from that failure. And evidently, right? We all do. This is how I approach some of these kind of things myself. So when we bring that to life, there's a specific set of examples here that you can talk us about how you approached a test and learn approach here. Yeah. Well, as we're talking about failure, like, I don't like to be wrong. And I like to think that I'm often not. But what we find is that, when we approach test and learn with agility, you are failing fast, but you're also every single one that's disproving your hypothesis, or your null hypothesis is actually a great learning. So there's actually no way to fail in test and learn. There's only a way to grow. And what is really important about the agile process is, again, how we're set up. So those Find It, Buy It, Get It, and Know Me that I mentioned earlier, those are actually turned into agile teams within our infrastructure. And what's incredible about that is that some of us run on scrum, some of us run on scrum bond like my team. But ultimately, what we're doing is at every single point, we are finding a piece or an insight and then changing and dramatically shifting, quickly shifting to capitalize on that insight. So that's what's really important about agility.

And then we have some notes up here for some ideas around building your own Test and Learn teams. I understand that it's really, really difficult to have enough staff to feel like you are built up to have a robust test and learn program. But really, if you have a small team, it can be one to two people. Those people do have to have a nice balance of skills between the marketing and the data brain. It's good to have somebody who is confident in UI/UX work. It's good to have a Shannon who's really good at your consumer journey. But two people can do a lot specifically with some of the tools that we have. Now if you are lucky and you're a lucky bunch and you have three to four team members, that's where you can really start working and getting to three to four tests per month. And that's where we'd like to see ourselves become. I think that's interesting as well in a way that I think, for me, that hits quite a sweet spot in a way that once a team gets too big, sometimes you start to lose that agility. It becomes a bit more committee based, and then you're just mired in governance or disagreement. And then you never really move forward. You lose some of that speed. There's a reason those agile principles of how large a team is or should be are pretty important. So I agree with that wholeheartedly. - Great. Thank you very much. - Yeah. So we saw earlier on the Adobe slide where there were four or five different blocks. We can rather sharply flip back to that. Things like digital commerce and experience management, customer journey management, which is marketing and analytics, and in marketing operations, so workflow and process. When you think of those things, what they really do is they come together in a story around how do you combine marketing and commerce together, which is, in my view, slightly biased. I don't have a lanyard on. But if I did, it would be red, right? We're uniquely paced about to provide customers with that type of capability. And when you think about your own journeys, what you want is marketing and commerce that matches single journey, single assets, single point of view. A customer should feel that their communications and their marketing and commerce experience are disjoint in any way. Key to that is the data. So it'd be really good if you could bring to life, and I know we've been here before, so I can say this with confidence. But you said yourself, you're a bit of a data nerd. - Yeah. - So it's not controversial. It's not an insult. It's all good.

So can you talk about how the marketing and data side of things has come together for you to really allow you to drive this side of the business forward? Sure, I'm a nerd of many kinds, but I'm first and foremost a data nerd. So I think what's really critical about your data collection is how robust it is. So one of the things that I'm a specific nerd about is the XDM or the experience data model. That is an Adobe construct of what is collected at each point in a consumer's journey, and with each interaction, what is being sent via your data layer to your analytics platform. The XDM is critically important. And it's one of those things that, as you are implementing anything, whether you're switching over to a new analytics suite, if you're exploring Commerce Connector or any other SDKs for data collection, that's the part that you need to focus on the most, right? The way we did it was that we approached it with data use cases. And those use cases were what we already had and then what we wanted to get to. And what we found is that by starting there, we would build out the XDM for each of those things, and what was nice about the XDM is that it kind of catches you in those things that you don't know. So it's a really safe mechanism to make sure that you're being comprehensive enough for your data layer. So I love the XDM, I'm a big proponent of it, and I think that because we have such a robust data layer, because we are so focused on what data collection points we're getting at each interaction, we were able to move a lot faster. Instead of waiting for maybe something like an event category, event action, and event label that comes through one tag and then waiting on your page title or other metadata about your page, that's all coming in in one server call instead. So that's something that really helps us when it comes to personalization and personalization quickly, real time. I think that's key when you're talking real time or near real time. How do you know who the person is and what they've just done? Because that's where the real value lies, right? What are the activities that that profile is performing? And can you activate on that in as near a time as possible? If you've got to capture that data and do something with it 30 days later, that magic moment is gone, right? This point, marketing doesn't live that long. So things like customer data platform have to be as sharp as possible in terms of near real time, five to six seconds are best. It's probably about as long as you want. And then you can give yourself business capabilities to do things with it rather than having to wait a week for a file from an FTP site as we were all used to for the last decade. And the speed and the agility of the site is also a big part of this as well. Being able to quickly collect that data and pass that data to where it needs to go. I know that we've all been there, where you've been doing some tag QA and you're like, why is this taking forever to load? Why can't I get my data where it needs to be? When you have a highly performant site, that kind of worry, that stress goes away. Correct. So if we step forward into one of the four scenarios you described earlier, the Find It side, this is about edge delivery services. So how does it affect your volume and traffic? This is going to move around a little bit.

So we look at things like enhancing a website, improving the visibility. This is where we're going to focus on this particular part. Organic traffic and then higher ranking. What we call this is performance first architecture. That phrase means that the technology starts off with a Core Web Vital score of 100 from day one. So you start off in a good place, and you build from there. So wherever you see this in any Adobe literature, performance first architecture, that's edge delivery starting at core web performance 400. It's a bit hidden in there. Not sure I'm maybe it was a mistake for me to come up with it. But we need to look at how that lands. And again, it's all about built in SEO practices to help organic traffic. We will sort of unveil this a little bit. And I'll get you to talk through what this means to you. Yeah, absolutely. So you can see we've got Black Friday of 2022 selected and then Black Friday of 2023 selected. What this is, is this is the exposure that maidenform.com has on non-branded search terms. And you can see that the incredible threefold change of exposure happened post edge delivery services. So this is where we are able to gain natural search traffic, which is valuable to us. It's a well converting channel, it's pretty healthy traffic, and it's also those people that might be using non branded search terms but looking to build brand loyalty with what they find. So this is really valuable traffic to us, right? And so to get this much exposure on day one, it's pretty incredible. Excellent. Great. So moving forward into the buy it phase that you talked about earlier, this is a bit more focused in terms of what did that mean, because fast pages is good, but it has to have a tangible outcome. So are you able to talk through some of these points here about bench rates? And because I know, again, you're in the data. What has your data experience been here? So I know that these are metrics taken from research that is outside of Hanes brands, but I can start talking about bounce rates. So, in our total site, our bounce rate has improved by 300 basis points. That's pretty incredible, considering that we've already gained year over year 3% traffic. We were in a traffic downturn, so to kind of see that reverse itself, to obviously be leaning on that natural search traffic, and then also to make sure that that specific natural search traffic actually had a bounce rate improvement of over 600 basis points. So that was incredible because, again, we're looking to keep that consumer on-site, we're looking to build that brand loyalty, and we're looking to inform that consumer of who Maidenform is. And we were able to do that because we were keeping them around longer.

Now for poor load time as the main reason for abandoning, this is one that is obvious to us. We're all impatient. We get to websites and anything over three seconds is pretty bad for us. So it's really incredible that we're able to deliver such a performance site on all devices, no matter the capabilities. So that's pretty wonderful too. That's a big testament to how bounce rate is improving. And then finally, the return rates of our consumers. So building, making sure that specifically, again, for this natural search traffic who might not know who Maidenform is, that return rate is really important to us. We want to see them back, either that through a different channel because of our activation or whether that just be because they enjoyed the experience. That's one that's huge for us. Great. But it's always interesting for me to hear some of the numbers in the real world because I, again, show my age. I remember a Nielsen report from the late 1990s, and they were talking sort of seven, eight seconds. And that was the accepted experience. But now when you think to your own experience, we're down in that sub one, two second range, right? Especially on a mobile device because you expect it to be instant. And if it's not, you turn away, and you go somewhere else unless it's a very niche purchase, in which case you're stuck on that slow performing website.

So this was all about site performance and speed. This is where we start to bring in the personalization journey a bit more, where we start to talk again about data. But actually applying that data into the frontend and turning this into a highly personalized experience, which is always trickier because typically that might start adding overheads and could be a source of slowing things down. But I think in this case, there's a great example you have here about how this has come together for you. Yeah, so, specifically, as we went into implementing our CDP on our other websites, we were exploring those other Adobe products. What we were seeing is that because we were having a better understanding of our consumer, that we were able to see a 41% conversion lift for one of our websites in Australia called Bonds for one of the segments that we had created. It was a browse abandon segment. We had previously just used email, right? And some of our email tagging to capture those browse abandoners. But what we found was that when we actually set the threshold a little higher for barrier to entry into a specific segment, we saw huge gains in that conversion. The same can be said for Champion, where we saw an 11.6% lift against our placebo group, where we were still using our older methods. So it was a really incredible way that it shows us that the more we know our consumer, the more we can personalize for our consumer. So content personalization is an area where we are new, but we're thriving. We want to get into this space of being able to use our real time capabilities for that consumer's profile, and then the hyper fast website speeds to make sure that every consumer is getting a unique and personalized experience that they can be proud of, that we can be proud of. I think in what Emmy's just summarized in about two minutes there, it's an incredibly difficult journey to achieve. When you think about your own, if you are a customer or a partner, I know there's a mix in the room, think about how you're operating your own platforms. The ability to take real time data and personalize a journey and then measure and report on that seems like a simple sentence, but it's far from that. It's a very complex thing to get into place and get to the point where, as a businessperson, you can actually use that and drive results from it. So I think that's extremely well summarized. You made it sound very simple. So I just want to kind of move that point forward and go, it's not that simple to do. It's quite a task.

So we're going to hit a summary here, in terms of where we are and where you are right now in the success factors.

I kind of want Leo to stand up and read that one, but I'm not...

So there's a great quote there, but I think, this is a nice snapshot of the journey you've been on and some of the landmarks you've hit.

And, again, this isn't about the software journey. This is about the enablement of these solutions into your organization, and you're adapting to how they drive your goals, which is key here. So are you able to take us through a couple of those? Yeah. Absolutely. So, I mean, we pride ourselves on being one of the fastest ecommerce websites in the entire world. We pride ourselves on being the first to do it. That's incredible. And to have consistent Lighthouse scores over 95, specifically on our homepage, we're hitting a 100 every single time, that is a big win for us. So I'm very proud of that metric at the top there. We have the improved operational efficiencies. This is something that is really incredible for our site management team. So I know that document-based authoring can seem scary to all the developers in the room. It seems like, okay, well, I'm relinquishing all of the responsibility that I've had on the frontend development to a site manager. But what's really incredible is that we found true partnership between UX, UI experts, specifically the frontend developers, and our site management team. And we've made our site management team much more performant and autonomous because they're able to go in and change things without having this arduous process of going through creative briefs and the machinations of changing those briefs and then sending that to Figma and then getting that coded in stage and then again, it's all happening for our site manager in document based editing. The easier and faster content updates, that's a big part of what I just talked about. I mean, we are talking about being able to use a Word document, people, and changing a website without having to blink an eye otherwise. That's pretty incredible. So we've seen huge adoption specifically for our marketers because they have now felt much more empowered to control the look and feel of their site. And then finally, solution agility that matches the business demand. So we are a quick moving site. We've got to move quick. All of us know this, that if you're not changing, you're losing, right? And so being able to remove so many barriers, and make this process so much easier, we've been able to really eliminate some of the stress that happens. And while that might not seem like a revenue driver, think about how much more your team can do by themselves. That alone is saving you on overhead. So, really incredible there. I think that's a key point.

Again, I mentioned the customer experience, customer history. Traditionally, I was in an IT space more as an enterprise architect. And you see this all the time with your customers, right? IT can often be the barrier that stops them moving at speed or stops them fulfilling the objectives that the business comes up with on a Friday afternoon. So the point you make there is extremely valuable in a way that this gives you the space to do what you want to do as a business without IT saying, hey, we need a project and 200, 300K or whatever the budget is and three months to get it done. Because that's what's effectively stifling the business moving forward. And IT was supposed to be an enabling department. One's supposed to be a department that halts you doing the things you want to actually go to market with. So for me, that's key.

Having come from places like Telco, I know that's the world they still live in, right? That's a hard place to be. And you don't get anything out of the door for two years. So I particularly love the story you have there. It's extremely powerful.

So we're halfway through. You're all still awake. That's excellent. Thank you very much. We are going to switch it up a little bit now. And we've had Emmy bringing this to life in terms of what Hanes have done. There may be a couple of questions in the room about what is it.

So I'm going to talk a little bit about what it actually is. What is it? How does it work? What does it do? Some of the key factors. Now some of this you may look at and go, we know it is back to front already. Some of you may not. So we're starting at a 101 level.

I have a couple of big balls on the screen. Some high-level facts, and this is from Tech Report from website load time. So this is a very recent industry body. None of this data is Adobe data. We don't make up our own data and present it back to you. That would be wrong. So you've all seen these statistics. Again, you're all shoppers. You all live this experience yourself. Think about how you bring this to life with your own shopping experiences. And we talked about this as part of the Hanes story that we just put together now. Three out of four shoppers will not return to a website if the page load speed is over four seconds. It's quite a common factor. How often do you go, I want to repeat buy something, but the website I bought it from was slow or clunky or wasn't there? You're not going back. You'll find another supplier. Capturing the commerce mindset is key, and keeping it is even harder. So that's quite interesting, right? Increase in AOV for every 0.1 second. I'm interested in this. There's a deep dive report, so we're looking at this a lot more because it is a sliding scale of speed and performance and how much you can increase an order value for a customer. Again, it's one of those trust factors. If the website doesn't perform well, if it looks like there's errors or there's poor personalization, it makes sense that order values are going to be smaller. And people aren't going to commit to spend if they don't trust your website. Pretty straightforward. When we look at that in a bit more detail, why are Core Web Vitals important? I think this is an interesting one because often, there's conversation around fast is the key to everything. Now speed is good, but speed has other connotations. So when we look at this, again, you've probably seen this number. Google accounts for 91.54, two decimal places. I did that for you. I'd normally just round it up. But because you're a data nerd, I made a special effort to be accurate. I feel honored. Yeah.

And that that's normalized across desktop and mobile. The mobile number is higher, and the desktop number is slightly lower. In my notes over there, my eyesight is too poor to see, the next closest competitor is Bing at 3.2%. So this isn't a competition, right? So I make that point because if you look at the green ball, Google's position on core web vitals is key. When you're playing the numbers, 91% of your customer base is coming from Google. So that's a massive amount, right? If you can't operate the Core Web Vital system, it's not going to work. It's as simple as that. There's a link on the bottom. If you haven't seen it, Google recently published a whole series of different documents. And they're very clear. They're clear in some respects, but they're very unspecific in others. Because if you read that, so at the bottom, core web vitals for success with search and ensure a great user experience. They don't define what a great user experience is very well at all. There's just an expectation that you will have one. So that's why I say that Core Web Vitals is key because it's a series of principles that you have to adhere to. Part of those principles are about page load speed, part of them are about having a successful experience on the site. And on the link, the document will be available after the session, so you don't have to look at it. There are a series of bullet points about how to treat your customers, what the journey should be, transparency about how you navigate, all those good web principles that you've known for quite some time. That's part of that collection of core web vitals. So when we talk in the next couple of slides about website speed and performance, that's part of the package. But it's not the entire answer, right? That speed will play a part in core web vitals. But it's not everything. Sometimes, you might hear people say, "Hey, Fastpage is going to win the day." No, it's going to get you far, but it's not going to win everything. That's not the entire answer.

And part of that is... There we go. How we approach this? So if any of you have got Experience Manager, that was a traditional CMS site, it's a content management site, okay? That was a situation where you created large objects, and you published them, and it was a feature rich heavyweight CMS. What we did a couple years ago was we, back to the persona journey, we went out to a whole series of customers content management systems of all different flavors, and we got inside the head of people who press the buttons. How do you live every day in the CMS world? How do you create pages? How do you manage content? How does that look for you on a day-to-day basis? Because we knew we wanted to do something interesting, in this case with Adobe Experience Manager. And we were, what does that mean? What does the modern web publishing experience look like? Because we could come up with a technical solution. We've got hundreds of thousands of engineers. And I'm an ex-coder, so I could probably knock something up based on what I anticipate that journey looks like. There's nothing like actually getting inside the roles of people who do that job every day. So that's what we did. We went out, we interviewed those people, we spoke to them. What would a good publishing experience look like? And that's where the core of edge delivery services came from, the process of how does this all come together to give you an experience that makes publishing easier? And Emmy touched on this just now. Often, what we found was you had a marketing team creating documentation, and they would do something in Figma or Word or PowerPoint or other things. They would pass that to another team. They'd be copying and pasting. There'd be a workflow there. Why does that workflow exist? Why don't we just cut down all that movement, copy and paste, and just give the businesspeople the capabilities to actually create that content themselves? And that's where document-based authoring came from. Document based, this is just a five-pillar point. But when you get to document based authoring, what that does is it massively gives back businesspeople control of managing their own content, takes away the IT element. When we look at this...

Part of this is a whole set of VIP projects. So there are ongoing projects right now who are implementing this and testing and learning and maturing what we're doing. This is a sample of those. I'm one of the members of that VIP program team. So if you want to pick this up as a topic afterwards from an Adobe point of view, you can speak to me. If you want to learn how it really works at Google, then you come speak to Emmylou and her team.

When I take some of that data and I roll it out across some of the customers that are working, you start to get results like this. So we're seeing many customers. This is me taking an Excel spreadsheet of 20, 30 customers and rolling all the numbers together. You start to see the fact that there are significant gains in using this technology to drive your storefront. So this is proofing the value. These are customers doing this in the real world. This isn't me in a test environment or our AEM engineers in a back office somewhere. This is specifically how customers right now are going live. They're seeing movement from 2.7 seconds from time to first byte, 13 times improvements in their speeds for loads. So this is the reality of how these customers are delivering these sites.

We've got a very strong principle about something isn't actually valuable to a customer until they've gone live, and they've tried it, and they've tested it. I can market to a feature and a product all you want, but it's not real unless someone's doing it in the real world and seeing the value. It's hypothetical.

So that's an interesting part. But I bring that to life a bit more with adobe.com.

You all know adobe.com? It's the big site. This is before and after. Some numbers along the bottom will start to appear as we click.

We converted certain segments of our own site. Why not test it on yourself, right? There's many analogies about drinking your own champagne. And there's one about dog food, which is particularly gross. I don't know if that works in America. Is there a eat your own dog food? Great. Okay, cool. You come out with analogies in a bar, and everyone's like, "What are you on about?" I should keep my localisms to myself.

But you can see here from high level statistics, SEO visits, page views. And this is why I said about Core Web Vitals. You can make a page faster, but what does that actually mean for the page? It's not just a faster page. Google will rank that higher. You'll be higher than your competitors. It will cost you less to get there because your rankings will be moved up the chain.

Google published this very well. Four companies all doing the same thing. The one with the highest lighthouse score will move up the chain. The higher up the chain you are, the more chance you are getting a click through. So it's easy to look at some of those numbers and go, makes absolute sense. Load times are faster, the bounce rate drops because people will be engaging more. It's all very key. So that's an interesting case study from our point of view, how that works. This will start playing. So if you get distracted because it's more interesting than me, feel free. But this is an easy way of showing you what document-based authoring means because that's not a familiar term. It's not something that people colloquially drop into conversation over coffee, right? We looked at this and went, how do we give businesspeople the capabilities to drive this themselves? Well, what do they know? What are the most common tools you can use as a businessperson? All right? In this case, this is Microsoft Word. It works across a couple of different options, Google Docs, Microsoft Word. They're common content creation tools that most of your businesspeople already know. What's the learning curve on creating a page in Word? There's nothing. Absolutely nothing. You can hire a junior person to come in and manage basic content very quickly and easily. So the barrier to entry is nothing. You can get going from the very start. Now the complexity in that ramps up very quickly. You can move it forward very, very fast indeed. But if you look across the content now, zero onboarding, you can publish content with familiar tools, you can manage that content, you can version control that content extremely easily. So that's the document side of things. We're adding versions to that. There's also a whole load of options around things like Excel. So you want to create an easy web form, basic contact form, you do that in Excel. You upload the page. Your form is created. You don't need an IT department to spend two, three weeks designing a form and writing validation. It's all in the schema for the Excel document. So you can go live quickly. That's the whole point. Now as a partner in the room, I would hope that your development cycle doesn't mean you're managing content for customers. I'd hope that you can move yourself into a position where you can build out great capabilities rather than just managing page content. That's what this is all about. How do you give the businesspeople capability to deliver what they need fast with agility while you do the important stuff that really shows the value you bring to the table? This is another example of what that looks like. So you can see this downstairs as well. This is a document source. And it is literally a Word document with a series of tables in it. These tables are all objects, and you can drop different pieces of tag into that. This is well documented on experience league. So you can see what each of these meta objects means. There's a nice guide to it, there's positional things. Some of it is obvious. The position might be a top, middle, bottom. It doesn't need any learning to figure out what top, middle, bottom means. It's right there. So some of it is inherently obvious. It's just a good example of what it looks like, what you'll see on a page.

If we move through to how we do that, think of that as the content layer. So you've created an edge delivery services content layer, that's your static content. What we do now from a commerce point of view, how do you get your commerce capabilities into that? Because that's pages. So what Adobe is doing and what we've done across the project with Emmy and team and all those other customers I mentioned, is we're exposing commerce capabilities via something called drop ins. And it's a highly imaginative name because we're visualizing it as actually just dropping it in, right? You've got a content layer, you drop in that capability, and you've brought commerce to bear in a content layer. It's a highly composable, headless way of building flexible websites. You decouple the content and the commerce. Emmy mentioned it on one of the other slides. Your commerce people can manage the commerce functionality and capabilities without fear of screwing up content, your content people can manage content seamlessly and easily without having to integrate into a difficult commerce space. So you've got the best of both worlds in terms of who manages what. So it gives you true agility in terms of teams working together, which we haven't seen before in some of the circumstances we do.

These are all modular and prebuilt. These are published publicly. They're on GitHub. You can go look at these rights now. They're right there. This isn't secret sauce from Adobe. These are all HTML and JavaScript. These are available for you to do what you want with if you're a partner. If you're a customer, you can go try them out. There'll be links to where this code lives. So this isn't something that you go, hey, that guy's talking about it, but it's going to take six months to go find. It's right there. It's public. Key thing, they're modular. They're pre-built. We build them with customers in these projects. So they're tried and tested. They go live when the project goes live. Customers use them in anger. So they're not me working with a dev team, in this case in Barcelona a lot of the time. It's very cool. Sunshine's warm. Much better than the UK. You can walk around in a t shirt and not die, it was always good.

But there's a whole bunch of those. You can see there, P2P, cart checkout, account user auth, log in, log out. So we have partners building these with us now. There is a whole network of partners, our partner organization, building these drop ins. We are leveraging our partners extensively to build these in collaboration with us. There are about another 20 of these on the roadmap for how they work. So we're chewing through those drop ins based on customer demand, which is why I'm always keen on customers going, hey, we want to do a project. We want to be a VIP candidate. We want to go in early, we want to shape how this works, we want to drive certain functionalities and capabilities. There are two or three stands on the shop floor right now where I've already approached them and gone, that's cool, how do we do that with a drop in? Let's get you on board. Let's do that. And that's the approach we're doing to accelerate how we deliver this capability to you in the field.

The custom one on the bottom is interesting. We've also published the SDK. So how do we build these? We've published the methodology, and we've published the kit to do it. So when I say we're bringing partners onboard we're also giving them the tools to do it, so that there's a standard approach. No free form, we build something crazy. Does it work? This is our best practice, this is how we do it, this is the format to follow, this is how it works, this is how it gets published. So it's a step-by-step playbook on how this is going to work for you. So it makes it easier and quicker and repeatable because what customers want is surety, right? They want an honest approach to this is plug and play. If you're going to say your product is composable, it needs to be. It needs to be a formula that is a standard across all of those things. And we're doing that frontend and backend. There's a session tomorrow on ERP integrations. And there's an SDK for that too. You've got a good idea? Keep it going across all your points, right? So how do you do that? And we're starting to get into the last 15 minutes. So if you're all going, it's getting a bit warm, don't worry. We're wrapping up. This is a super straightforward slide for how you might want to try this. And this is specifically how, for example, if you're a customer with an IT department or if you're a partner in a room, you can do this now. There is nothing stopping you doing this. You do not need a partner portal sandbox. You don't need me to hold your hand. It's right there for the taking online in GitHub.

And this is the sort of thing that we have defined across these VIP programs. Am I in front of the prompter again? I've got a thing about this prompt. So you can go there, and you can download the GitHub code. And you can try it, and you can give it a test, and you can run it locally. And that works extremely well for you. So I don't like the phrase. The proof is in the pudding. I don't know where it came from, but it feels wrong. But you can test this yourself, this is self-validation and standard method. We've had partners do this and go live in less than two weeks with custom storefronts. So it works, and that's something I do quite a lot in Europe.

We see many, many European partners in particular. I can talk about European examples because I live in Europe, and I talk to them a lot. I talk less about the American ones because they're always online at 9 o'clock at night. It's getting kind of annoying.

But they've taken that boilerplate, and they've changed the Adobe logos and the brand and look and feel. And they've added their own brand. And they've gone to market with a specific partner brand. I'm not going to name them because that would suck for those of you that aren't partner. But they've got a URL and a program and a PDF and they're going to market hard on that because it's real.

This isn't a theoretical, how does this work? So that's my quick, what is edge delivery as a product? We're going to come back to you...

Just to make sure you're still going. And we're going to do three quick takeaways from today. And these go back to where we were at the beginning. So number one, test and learn. You described extremely accurately how you've got different sized teams for agility to allow you to test and learn and drive the business forward, I think that's really key. So I think that's an amazing point. Thank you very much for that.

The organizational framework that you described, that four step thing, I think that's intrinsic to this process and how that worked. If you don't have a framework, it's going to be hard to move forward because it's the Wild Wild West.

I don't know if that's a slur in America because I described that as being a bad thing. Maybe Americans love the Wild Wild West, so sorry.

It's a historical golden period. Who knows? But again, have a framework, right? Have a way of working. Have a process. Everyone's defined, everyone knows what that process is, everyone can work through it, everyone knows what their role is in the process, and you can move with agility. That's key because this isn't about a software fix. This is about how does your business work across this in an effective way? You don't implement organizational change. It doesn't matter what the software is. It's never going to work. Simple as that.

And then, again, alignment between customer journey and business outcome goals. Identify your goals. What are you trying to achieve? How are you trying to achieve it? This is key for this and for a lot of the generative AI topics you see. Some of the applications and solutions we're putting out now and some of the customers that are using them extremely effectively, their success comes from keeping an eye on the gold. Because with things like AI and GenAI, you can just go crazy. And you can do anything. But sometimes some of the stuff you do isn't extremely valuable for what you're doing. And then you have to say to your boss, "Hey, I just spent all day on Firefly creating pictures of monkeys in space with laser guns and it was a complete waste of time. But it was GenAI, so it's pretty cool," and you go, "No, not really." So keep a focus on what that business goal is and how it's going to drive your business forward. And I think what you described here is extremely valuable because you've got the data to measure it and move it forward. So three key takeaways. We'll have Q and A in a second. But what I want to do is two things I want you to have a look at, build an impactful storefront on edge delivery services. So my colleague, Alina, is running a hands-on lab tomorrow morning. I think it's very early. Well, I say it's at 8:30. You're probably going, "That's not early. What are you on about?" It's early for me because I've got children, and in a hotel, I can stay in bed all day.

But there's a hands-on lab there. So you can come in, and you can do it. You can get your hands dirty. There's a lab book for that. That lab book is going to be published afterwards as well. So we give you a guide. All right. The technology is there, the guide is there, you can do it, you can give it a try. In a room, big I think they're Macs silver things. I'm a Windows guy, so it just looks weird to me. So that's there. Also, this is yesterday.

There's a session that was run yesterday.

I think you said you had a planted question in that one, I think. So we've got the Hanes brands team at the front.

That was your session. Right, Leo? Good. Leo was in that session. We record a lot of these. So there's a recording you can watch there. That's a very nice complimentary session to this one. So I would recommend having a look at that QR code. It will give you a link to the session. In the next day or two, all of the summit website will flip so that you can go watch those recordings because they're all going to be online. So go watch it at your own leisure. If you're on a four-hour flight, maybe just watch it on a flight or something. But that's a great story that goes with this. I will wrap there, and I will point at you.

So this is Emmy. You saw Emmy talk today. Emmy knows this story back to front. If you're a customer and you go, "Hey, I just want to talk to a customer. I don't want to talk to an Adobe person." We've got Emmy here. That's her LinkedIn profile in a squiggly QR code from Japan. They're very cool. That's what she looks like. You can see her in real life. Same thing, right? It's all good. And she's not AI. So come speak to Emmy. Emmy's team, the Hanes brand team are at the front as well. So again, come and have a conversation. That's part of the joy of Summit. Bring the customers together. And you don't need to listen to me go, "Hey, look, it's all rainbows and unicorns." You can listen to Emmy do that because she does it far better than I do because she's lifted. We're done on time. Thank you very much, Emmy. - That's awesome for sharing. - Thank you, guys. Thank you.

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